The Spanish love to chat. In fact, some of us foreigners have been unkind enough to suggest they sometimes favour it over thinking. This is probably unfair but sometimes you can hardly blame us. Today I had to wait 15-20 minutes to pay the toll on the motorway south to Vigo. The last 4 or 5 of these were in sight of the booths but our arrival at these clearly came as a huge surprise to the people in the car in front of me. Or this is what I surmised after watching all 3 of them spend at least a minute searching for small change in their pockets.

The driver of the train which crashed near Palencia on Monday evening has said he was obeying all the rules. The government, on the other hand, says he was doing more than 125 on a 30km stretch and had ignored warnings to slow down. Little room for compromise there.

There were two news items in the UK press this morning that would shock the Spanish. The first was that a man had been shot dead by a gang he was remonstrating with in his street - the same gang that had stabbed him earlier in the year. The second was that a woman head teacher who had successfully transformed a failing secondary school had been sacked for giving her sister a job.

Rather more interesting reading for Brits is the sight of UK government ministers falling over themselves to stress it’s no longer considered racist or politically incorrect to question whether unlimited immigration and blind multiculturalism have been an unqualified success for the country. These are the same people, of course, who screamed ‘Racist!’, whenever the last government tried to question liberal orthodoxy. The implausible excuse given for this massive change of heart is that something must be done to take the wind out of the sails of the far right extremists. Nothing, then, to do with public concern at immigrant numbers in the last 2 years being more than 20 times in excess of government forecasts.

I bought a ladder today and found it an unusually pleasant experience. Reason? it wasn’t festooned with notices advising me, for example, not to use it above a pit of crocodiles.